1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to enclosures for protecting and dissipating heat from electronic equipment such as telecommunications repeaters. More particularly, the invention relates to such an enclosure that effectively dissipates heat in a passive manner and that is lightweight, inexpensive, space efficient and durable enough to be used in any applications.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The ever-increasing use of the internet, wide area networks, and other networks has increased the demand for high-speed, high-bandwidth digital telecommunications services such as ISDN, DSL, and T1 services in homes and businesses. Because of signal propagation limitations, these digital services require the use of repeaters to repeat signals if end users are too far from their provider's central office.
The repeaters used for these digital services are typically housed in protective enclosures that are mounted to telephone poles or placed next to buildings or in manholes. The enclosures must be designed to protect the repeaters from natural elements such as sun, rain, snow, and fire as well as damage from vandalism and attempted theft.
Just as importantly, the enclosures must be designed to dissipate excess heat generated by the repeaters. All electronic components generate heat that must be dissipated to ensure optimum and reliable operation. Such heat dissipation has become increasingly more difficult as electronic components have become faster, more powerful, and smaller, and therefore hotter. Heat dissipation from remote telecommunications equipment such as repeaters is particularly difficult because telecommunications enclosures are typically not connected to electricity sources and therefore cannot rely on fans or other active cooling elements. The enclosures therefore must be designed to dissipate heat passively by conduction and convection to ambient air, which can frequently reach temperatures of well over 100.degree. F., especially when the enclosures are exposed to direct sunlight. In addition to weather protection and heat dissipation requirements, it is also desirable that telecommunications enclosures be lightweight, space efficient, and inexpensive.
Many prior art telecommunication enclosures attempt to passively dissipate heat with heat sink methods. Heat sink dissipation methods require that all components that are conducting heat from repeaters in an enclosure contact either the repeaters directly or other components touching the repeaters to form a continuous thermal conduction path from the repeaters. Prior art enclosures attempt to obtain such continuous thermal conduction path with complicated mechanical linkage assemblies that are expensive to manufacture, difficult to use and that increase the size and weight of their enclosures.
There is therefore a need for an improved telecommunications enclosure that protects repeaters and other electronics from exposure to weather conditions and damage from vandalism; that more effectively dissipates excess heat from the electronic components in a passive manner; and that is relatively lightweight, space efficient, and inexpensive. There is also a need for such an enclosure that creates an improved path of thermal conduction from repeaters without the use of complicated, expensive, and heavy mechanical linkage assemblies.